A "physical to virtual" (P2V) capability is used to directly migrate
an existing Solaris system into a native zone on a target system.

Assessing the System To Be Migrated

Depending
on the services performed by the original system, the global administrator
might need to manually customize the zone after it has been installed. For
example, the privileges assigned to the zone might need to be modified. This
is not done automatically. Also, because all system services do not work inside
zones, not every physical system is a good candidate for migration into a
zone.

Note that if the system image to be installed through P2V is newer than
the target host operating system release, the installation will fail.

View the storage utilized, for example, by viewing the contents
of /etc/vfstab.

View the amount of local disk storage in use, which determines
the size of the archive:

# df -k

Determine the packages and patches that are on the system. See pkginfo(1) for more information.

Examine the contents of /etc/system.

Creating the Image Used to Directly Migrate A Solaris
System Into a Zone

You
can use the Flash Archiving tools to create an image of an installed system
that can be migrated into a zone.

The system can be fully configured with all of the software that will
be run in the zone before the image is created. This image is then used by
the installation program when the zone is installed.

Caution –

If you create a Solaris Flash archive, or flar,
of a Solaris 10 system that has a ZFS root, then by default, the flar will
actually be a ZFS send stream, which can be used to recreate the root pool.
This image cannot be used to install a zone. You must create the flar with
an explicit cpio or pax archive when
the system has a ZFS root.

Use the flarcreate command
with the -Larchiver option, specifying cpio or pax as the method to archive the files.
See Step 4 in the next procedure.

How to Use flarcreate to Create
the Image

Use the flarcreate command
described in the flarcreate(1M) man page to create the system image. This example
procedure uses NFS to place the flash archive on the target Solaris system,
but you could use any method to move the file.

You must be the global administrator in the global zone to perform this
procedure.

Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.

Log in to the source system to be archived.

Change directories to the root directory.

# cd /

Use flarcreate to create a flash archive image
file named s10-system on the source system, and place the
archive onto the target system:

The target machine will require root write access
to the /export file system. Depending on the size of the
file system on the host system, the archive might be several gigabytes in
size, so enough space should be available in the target filesystem.

Tip –

In some cases, flarcreate can display errors
from the cpio command. Most commonly, these are messages
such as File size of etc/mnttab has increased by 435. When
these messages pertain to log files or files that reflect system state, they
can be ignored. Be sure to review all error messages thoroughly.

Other Archive Creation Methods

You can use alternate methods for creating the archive. The installer
can accept the following archive formats:

cpio archives

gzip compressed cpio archives

bzip2 compressed cpio archives

pax archives created with the -xxustar (XUSTAR) format

ufsdump level zero (full) backups

Note that the installer can only accept a directory of files created
by using an archiving utility that saves and restores file permissions, ownership,
and links.

If you use a method other than flash archive for creating an archive
for P2V, you must unmount the processor-dependent libc.so.1lofs-mounted hardware capabilities (hwcap) library
on the source system before you create the archive. Otherwise, the zone installed
with the archive might not boot on the target system. After you have created
the archive, you can remount the proper hardware capabilities library on top
of /lib/libc.so.1 by using lofs and
the mount -O option.

Host ID Emulation

When applications are migrated from a physical Solaris system
into a zone on a new system, the hostid changes to be the hostid of the new machine.

In some cases, applications depend on the original hostid,
and it is not possible to update the application configuration. In these cases,
the zone can be configured to use the hostid of the original
system. This is done by setting a zonecfg property to specify
the hostid, as described in How to Configure the Zone. The value used should be the output of
the hostid command as run on the original system. To view
the hostid in an installed zone, also use the hostid command.

Configuring the Zone

If you will be using CDs or DVDs to install applications in the
new zone, use addfs to add read-only
access to CD or DVD media in the global zone when you initially configure
the branded zone. A CD or DVD can then be used to install a product in the
branded zone. See How to Add Access to CD or DVD Media in a Non-Global Zone for more information.

Installing the Zone

The zoneadm command described in Part II, Zones and in the zoneadm(1M) man
page is the primary tool used to install and administer non-global zones.
Operations using the zoneadm command must be run from the
global zone on the target system.

In addition to unpacking files from the archive, the install process
performs checks, required postprocessing, and other functions to ensure that
the zone is optimized to run on the host.

If you created a Solaris system archive from an existing system and
use the -p (preserve sysidcfg) option when
you install the zone, the zone will have the same identity as the system used
to create the image.

If you use the -u (sys-unconfig)
option when you install the zone on the target, the zone produced will not
have a hostname or name service configured.

Caution –

You must specify either the -p option
or the -u option, or an error results.

Installer Options

Option

Description

-aarchive

Location of archive from which to copy system image. Full flash archive
and cpio, gzip compressed cpio, bzip compressed cpio, and level 0 ufsdump are
supported. Refer to the gzip man page available in the SUNWsfman package.

-dpath

Location of directory from which to copy system image.

-d—

Use the -d option with the dash parameter to direct
that the existing directory layout be used in the zonepath.
Thus, if the administrator manually sets up the zonepath directory
before the installation, the -d— option
can be used to indicate that the directory already exists.

-p

Preserve system identity.

-s

Install silently.

-u

sys-unconfig the zone.

-v

Verbose output.

-bpatchid

One or more -b options can be used to specify a patch
ID for a patch installed in the system image. These patches will be backed
out during the installation process.

The -a and -d options are mutually exclusive.
The -p, -s, -u and -v options
are only allowed when either -a or -d is provided.

How to Install the Zone

Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.

Install the configured zone s-zone by using
the zoneadm command with the install-a option and the path to the archive.